Waste Not, Want Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  _Illustrated by Kelly Freas_]

  WASTE NOT, WANT

  _Eat your spinach, little man! It's good for you. Stuff yourself with it. Be a good little consumer, or the cops will get you.... For such is the law of supply and demand!_

  BY DAVE DRYFOOS

  Panic roused him--the black imp of panic that lived under the garish rugof this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake andstare from the blank space to his left where Tillie's gray head shouldhave been.

  His fists clenched in anger--at himself. He'd never been the sort tomake allowance for his own weakness and didn't propose to begin doing sonow, at age eighty-six. Tillie'd been killed in that crash well over ayear ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quitsearching for her every morning.

  But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly.The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself itwas hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer,and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in this house his Tilliehad never seen.

  The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated allits furnishings.

  The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen; the magnetically-suspended divansin the living room; the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could soreadily project to any wall or ceiling; the solartropic machinery thatwould turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade orthe breeze; the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feetinto the air to give him a wider view and more privacy--all left himdissatisfied.

  They were new. None had been shared with Tillie. He used them only tothe extent required by law to fulfill his duty as a consumer.

  "You must change your home because of the change in your familycomposition," the Ration Board's bright young female had explained,right after Tillie's funeral. "Your present furnishings are obsolete.You must replace them."

  "And if I don't?" He'd been truculent.

  "I doubt we'd have to invoke the penalties for criminalunderconsumption," she'd explained airily. "There are plenty of otherpossible courses of action. Maybe we'd just get a decision that you'reprematurely senile and unable to care for yourself. Then you'd go to ahome for the aged where they'd _help_ you consume--with forced feedingsand such."

  So here he was, in this home-of-his-own that seemed to belong to someoneelse. Well, at least he wasn't senile, even if he did move a littleslowly, now, getting out of bed. He'd warm up soon. All by himself. Withno one's help.

  And as far as these newfangled gadgets in the bathroom were concerned,he could follow any well-written set of directions. He'd scalded himselfthat time only because the printed instructions were so confusing.

  He took a cold shower this time.

  When the airtowel had finished blowing and he was half dry--not whollydry because the machine wasn't adapted to people who took ice-coldshowers--he went in to the clothing machine. He punched the same fewholes in its tape that he put there every day, stood in the right place,and in due course emerged with his long, rawboned frame covered bymagenta tights having an excessively baggy seat.

  He knew the costume was neither pretty nor fashionable and that itsdesign, having been wholly within his control when he punched the tape,revealed both his taste and his mood. He didn't care; there was no onein the world whom he wanted to impress.

  He looked in the dressing room mirror not to inspect the tights but toexamine his face and see if it needed shaving. Too late he rememberedthat twenty years had elapsed since the permanent depilatories werefirst invented and ten since he'd used one and stopped having to shave.

  There were too many changes like that in this gadget-mad world; too manynew ways of doing old things. Life had no stability.

  He stalked into the kitchen wishing he could skip breakfast--angeralways unsettled his stomach. But everyone was required to eat at leastthree meals a day. The vast machine-records system that kept track ofeach person's consumption would reveal to the Ration Board any failureto use his share of food, so he dialed Breakfast Number Three--tomatojuice, toast, and coffee.

  The signal-panel flashed "Under-Eating" and he knew the statemachine-records system had advised his cybernetic cooker to increase theamount of his consumption. Chin in hands, he sat hopelessly at thekitchen table awaiting his meal, and in due course was served prunes,waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, and tea--none of which he liked, except fortoast.

  He ate dutifully nevertheless, telling himself he wasn't afraid of theration-cops who were always suspecting him of underconsumption becausehe was the tall skinny type and never got fat like most people, but thathe ate what the cooker had given him because his father had beenunemployed for a long time during the depression seventy-five yearsbefore, so he'd never been able to bring himself to throw food away.

  Failure to consume had in the old days been called "overproduction" andby any name it was bad. So was war--he'd read enough about war to beglad that form of consumption had finally been abolished.

  Still it was a duty and not a pleasure to eat so much, and a relief toget up and put the dirty dishes into the disposal machine and go uptopside to his gyro.

  * * * * *

  Disgustingly, he had a long wait before departure. After climbing intothe gyro and transmitting his flight plan, he had to sit seething forall of fifteen minutes before the Mount Diablo Flight Control Centerdeigned to lift his remote-controlled gyro into the air. And when thesignal came, ascent was so awkwardly abrupt it made his ears pop.

  He couldn't even complain. The Center was mechanical, and unequipped tohear complaints.

  It routed him straight down the San Joaquin Valley--a beautiful sightfrom fifteen thousand feet, but over-familiar. He fell asleep andawakened only when unexpectedly brought down at Bakersfield Field.

  Above his instrument panel the printing-receiver said "Routine Check ofEquipment and Documents. Not Over Five Minutes' Delay."

  But it could take longer. And tardiness was subject to officialpunishments as a form of unproductiveness. He called George Harding atthe plant.

  Harding apparently had been expecting the call. His round bluff facewore a scowl of annoyance.

  "Don't you ever watch the newscasts?" he demanded angrily. "They beganthis 'Routine Check' you're in at five this morning, and werebroadcasting pictures of the resulting traffic jam by six. If you'dfiled a flight plan for Santa Barbara and come on down the coast you'dhave avoided all this."

  "I'm not required to listen to newscasts," Fred replied tartly. "I ownthe requisite number of receivers and--"

  "Now, listen, Fred," Harding interrupted. "We need you down here sohurry up!"

  Fred heard him switch off and sat for a moment trembling with rage. Buthe ended by grinning wryly. Everyone was in the same boat, of course.For the most part, people avoided thinking about it. But he could nowsee himself as if from above, spending his life flitting back and forthbetween home and plant, plant and home; wracking his brain to deviselabor-saving machines while at the plant, then rushing home to strugglewith the need to consume their tremendous output.

  Was he a man? Or was he a caged squirrel racing in an exercise-wheel,running himself ragged and with great effort producing absolutelynothing?

  He wasn't going to do it any longer, by golly! He was going to--

  "Good morning!" A chubby young man in the pea-green uniform of aration-cop opened the door and climbed uninvited into the cockpit. "MayI check the up-to-dateness of your ship's equipment, please?"

  Fred didn't answer. He didn't have to. The young officer was already inthe manual pilot's seat, checking the secondary co
ntrols.

  In swift routine he tried motor and instruments, and took the craftbriefly aloft. Down again, he demanded Fred's papers.

  The licenses that pertained to the gyro were in order, but there wastrouble over Fred's personal documents: his ration-book contained fartoo few sales-validations.

  "You're not doing your share of consuming, Oldtimer," the young cop saidmildly. "Look at all these unused food allotments! Want to cause adepression?"

  "No."

  "Man, if you don't eat more than this, we'll have mass starvation!"

  "I know the slogans."

  "Yes, but do you know the penalties? Forced feeding, compulsoryconsumption--do you think they're fun?"

  "No."

  "Well, you can file your flight